Page - 154 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

154 | Entangled Entertainers Aspects of Anti-Zionist Pastiche In Josef Armin’s farce, Grosswardein stands in for Palestine, which provides in Zionist ideology a refuge for Jews who encounter hostility in their surroundings and fear for their physical safety and mental health. Lipperl and Maxi are two Jewish characters who no longer wish to tolerate the violence and psychological pressure that they confront in their everyday lives in Vienna and therefore seek a new way of life. In this sense, their willingness to travel to Grosswardein by train seems to correspond to the desire many Jews had when planning to leave for Palestine. However, in the play, there are no rabid antisemites making life diffi cult for Lipperl and Maxi. Rather, the source of their dissatisfaction is their quarrelsome wives. Armin’s farce thus takes the theme of hostile conditions in the Diaspora, one of the primary concerns among Zionist supporters and a principal reason contributing to their advocating leaving Europe, and detaches it from anti-Jewish peculiarity, thus rendering it humorous. Th e Journey to Grosswardein questions whether the reason that the Zionists give for building their own com- munity in Palestine is really as serious as they claim. Armin’s choice of Grosswardein (Oradea in present-day Romania) as a met- aphor for Palestine is no coincidence. Located in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy, the town was considered a largely Jewish center due to the ethnic composition of its population. It had around fi fty thousand inhabitants at the turn of the century, 70 percent of whom were Jewish.17 Grosswardein was thus a fi tting choice to symbolize the site of Jewish settlement, an analogue to the concept of Palestine so integral to Zionist ideology. We should note that in Armin’s farce a song about Grosswardein evokes in the character Fritz Engländer a desire to visit the city. In fact, at the turn of the century, there was a hugely popular song called “Nach Grosswardein” (To Gross- wardein). Hungarian Jewish composer Hermann Rosenzweig wrote the music.18 Th e cover of the song sheet, which sold numerous copies, depicts four Hasidic Jews da ncing against a silhouette of Grosswardein. Th e image thus creates an iconographic association between Judaism and this geographic location, empha- sizing its signifi cance as a Jewish city. In this context, we also identify an addi- tional reference to Zionism: the outline of Grosswardein depicted on the song sheet imbues the site with a Middle Eastern character. With vaguely recognizable mosques illustrated in the background, the image evokes an “Oriental” atmo- sphere.19 Th is portrayal of Grosswardein is thus more reminiscent of Palestine and the landscape of the eastern Mediterranean than the landscape of Transylva- nia, where it was actually located. In this sense, the image on the song sheet links the “Jewish city” of Gross- wardein with Palestine. Within this context, it comes as no surprise that Josef Armin chose Grosswardein as the focal point for his anti-Zionist satire. Th ere are two additional reasons why Armin may have specifi cally chosen Grosswardein: This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.